While all these numbers of potential waste from turbine blades sound bad, realize that the CUMULATIVE projected waste from ALL turbines decommissioned between now and 2050 is less than 5 percent of the coal ash the world produces EACH YEAR. So yes, this will be good for PR, and maybe it will even save a little money, but recycling turbine blades is of miniscule importance compared to reducing carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels overall.
@@VeniceInventors In principle, yes, but in fact, only about 60% gets reused, meaning about 200 times more coal ash than turbine blades would have to be disposed of between now and 2050 assuming current levels of coal use. So every wind turbine we build is a massive reduction in the space we need to dispose of waste, even if none of the turbine blades get recycled.
Some glass fibre blades are now being shredded and the waste added to concrete. I do wonder if some practical alternate use could be found for the blades, eg cut them up in to staves and use them for fencing.
On the subject of the blades currently headed to landfill: They could easily serve a second life as a bus shelter, house roof or noise abaitment barrier at the side of a busy carriageway; it shows we have a problem with lack of creative thought rather than an item that is truely at the end of its useful life.
the problem with creative solutions is that they are very niche and don't really solve the problem. they could offer to sell the blades for people wanting to buy them for a specific projects. but overall it wouldn't solve the problem.
Other ways to reuse the GFR, first-gen blades are materials for wall and floor tiles (which a German SMB is doing already; I'd link the video of German public broadcaster MDR directly but sadly links are not allowed. You find it under the title "Wertvolle Rohstoffe: Wie entsorgt man ein ausrangiertes Windrad richtig? | Umschau | MDR"). Researchers are already finding ways to separate the resin from the fibers of the CFR blades via acid solutions that leave the valuable tissue layers intact and allow for their recycling and of the resin. GFR and CFR fibers are also a good replacement for sand as binding and reinforcement material for concrete.
@@sitling5436 Well, yes but somebody must have thought of that. Don't forget that the turbine blades are old and worn and beyond their useful life. Ordinary punters like you and me don't know what kind of degradation has occurred within the GRP during a hard life bending in the wind.
also, Modvion in Sweden makes full size wooden towers. After the wind turbine's life of 30 years, the tower sections can be re-used as small housing, construction etc. And 100 years after that, as heating fuel. That's a long time carbon sink, while more trees are grown.
Dave you always come up with excellent educational content. It really does inspire. I never went to University (much to the chagrin of my former teachers). My excuse was “I’ve tried being skint & don’t like it”. For some years I’ve been interested in materials science & have encouraged younger people to really consider it as a worthwhile study & career. Please keep on doing what you’re doing. 👏🏻
As others have pointed out, one missing piece of information in the video is the ratio of wind turbine blades to the total amount of stuff going onto landfills. Of course, every single source of waste should be scrutinized, and this video is focused on just one, which is fair, but there's a lot of unnecessary argument caused by leaving this little bit😊 of info out.
What else is there on a windturbine thats not recycleable? Copper and steel = easy $ Concrete can be recycled in building and making new concrete. Its only the fiberglass blades and shell that was non recycleable until recently.
I think you misunderstand. Not the ratio of the blades to the rest of the wind turbine, the ratio of wind turbine waste to all of the waste that's put in landfills from any source. @@NewPipeFTW
@@polanve yes, for instance, waste from the coal, oil and natural gas industries. Food packaging that we don't need (not the stuff we do, the unnecessary stuff we all agree is pointless). I think someone else said this is great for PR but won't actually do much. The public perception that this is a lot of waste, is worth fighting with improved recycling.
Does fiberglass really leech that badly? Couldn't the old blades be cut up and used for breakwater sites to protect people from hurricanes and tsunamis? Google search says "fiberglass material is non-reactive to salt and is not susceptible to corrosion or damage from the salt."
@@danyoutube7491 I suppose it's possible. Was thinking processed chunks could be mixed into aquatic concrete and added to breakwater sites. Surely there's a low-tech solution to make good use of them.
The epoxy resin keeping the glass fibres together is indeed not very environmentally friendly and can leech for example BPA when protective layers are eroded or shredded. The reuse potential for now is mostly concrete substrate, for which there is a lot of demand. But the area where demand exists doesn't always match where the turbines are situated. So for multiple reasons it is desirable to use more environmentally friendly resins.
Wonderful, a larger footprint per tower. Meanwhile, a vertical wind turbine design based on large spinnaker sails would catch more wind and be set atop one another. Each level of the tower should hold 3 to 6 spinnakers to increase rotation. Also, the spinnakers could be made from biodegradable or recyclable materials, such as cloth like the sails on the Cutty Sark or a Clipper ship. To save weight, the sails could be made in panels or with a grid of small "windows" properly reinforced in the spinnakers. This design in a compact version that could be mounted atop tall buildings, along the dyed to resemble a merry go round, in urban wind tunnels between buildings, and other windy places. The vertical layout gives options on where to place the generator, top -middle or -bottom. This will also allow extra sound proofing around the structure. The generator could be put underground. To minimize tower flex, a set of 4 could be loosely connected at the top by retaining bars. Just have a Think. If you throw away the box, so much more is possible.
Clearly many people have not seen your other videos on the attempt to recycle the existing blades so perhaps they should look those up. Thanks for this very good news. NREL is one of the best places to get up to date green research in the US for many years now.
How do the fiberglass blades leech toxic chemicals into landfills? Aren’t they inert? And how much mass/volume do blades make up in landfills compared to municipal solid waste?
No they don't and I once did the math. The blades in the whole world who will be decommised is about the same amount as 8 years of building vaste in my home country Denmark. And I live in a very small country. Nearly nothing af that waste is recycled.
Engineering with Rosie, calculated that if a person powered their home from wind power for 20 years, they would be contributing 9kg of composite waste to landfill. Buying a carbon fiber bike produces more composite waste.
I was thinking this would have "Hemp" in it's mix as that plant can be used for this as well, but anything that moves to stop humanities rush to end this planet's ability to support life as we know it is welcome.
@@morninboy Yes, I remember that. I think they should revisit Hemp as I think that will solve many of their problems. ruclips.net/video/srgE6Tzi3Lg/видео.html
hemp is not magic, it's just really good fibers. but carbon fibers are not the problem here, it's the polymers used to bind everything together. if they used hemp they would still need to use the same polymers to give it rigidity.
I noticed that Siemens Gamesa are developing a fully recyclable blade. As with all aspects of renewable energy, things keep getting better and better over time. That is what I love about this industry. I also hope that the current blades in landfills will be recycled in the future, in an energy to waste type set up maybe ?????
Very interesting. And very needed. I didn't hear you mention it ... but ... another major (new?) concern with these fiberglass wind turbine blades is that they do degrade while in service. They actually shed fiberglass material off the blades and into the surrounding environment. Floating ones ... into the seas/oceans ... and land based ones, which usually (around us, at least) is in farm lands. That is into the food supply. Can you say "Yikes!". This brings to mind the push several years ago to switch from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs ... which I did ... but which, as I did hear later, contained mercury in the base and which were most probably mostly thrown into landfills as well. Can you say "Yikes!", again. Last item on the "balance out the good with the bad" rant; Solar panels. I love the tech ... I am a retired engineer ... I've been keeping my eyes on the progress for a long time. Initially, I had heard that it took more energy to mine & transport materials, manufacture, transport and install than the panels would ever generate in their lifetimes. Also when I looked at it a bunch of years ago the cost verses payback was absurd. However, time passes, progress is made. However, the one aspect that I continue to monitor is their disposal. They contain a lot of heavy metals and the vast majority of the panels reaching their end of life are ... surprise, surprise ... being dumped into the landfills. Third times the charm ... "Yikes!" It may sound like I'm against all these ... I am not. I'm again looking into getting my house set up with solar/batteries/inverter. I guess I may do what everyone else is doing ... kick that can down the street, to be delt with later by somebody else.
The amount of mass that they shed is trivial compared to the real problems, like plastic packaging, plastic clothing fibers, fishnets, etc. We need to think about the harm of NOT using wind power. Coal is a thousand times worse. Maybe a million times worse.
Bio renewable resources are future anyway since we have limited resources and not everything can be recycled What I think is that first we will move towards alternatives and recycling and in the end back to natural or biological resources in every possible sector may be it construction or computing ❤
I've been pondering how our energy production -and needs- are evolving, and I'm glad to see that recycling is making its way into wind, hopefully into solar as well. It is certainly more encouraging than what I remember in the dystopian movie "Soylent Green," in which Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) had to mount a stationary bicycle in their apartment to keep the single pitiful lightbulb glowing. 😦
Worth a go. I'm a bigger fan of solar panels all over every building and parking lot. From what I understand, the materials for those are very recyclable.
Stick to your guns. By my estimates the cost of putting solar panels on homes to equal the amount of a given wind farm is about 1/10 the cost. Another words that takes about $200,000 worth of equipment out in the water to obtain the electricity that you get from $20,000 worth of solar panels on a home.
Turbine blades are a pretty small fraction of the market for fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Auto, truck, and aircraft bodies, furnishings, architectural components . . . the potential is huge for a truly re-usuable polymer. I also wonder what, exactly, is the failure mode for blades that reach the end of their lives while still in use. If the carbon fibers are still fine, would it be possible to anneal the blades, relieving any internal stresses and healing any cracks and delaminations? (You'd need some degree of thermoplasticity in the cured polymer, but that can be designed in.)
The wind turbine blades make up less than 10% of the total composites that are disposed of in landfills. There is a much larger amount of composites like boat hulls, shower stalls, surfboards, industrial waste, etc.
I was thinking about the Netherlands and their polder system recently... Couldn't the used blades we've already made go into raising low-lying areas with these stable materials? That could be a benefit from such blades until they are phased out.
Good point. And this not only goes for turbine blades. As en aeronautical engineer, the use of composite carbon fibre has concerns me. As it breaks down its not going to be good for the environment. Great to see solutions being proposed.
The 30 to 90% reduction in GHG emissions for the SECOND iteration of these turbine blades is great, but that doesn't help the primary producer unless they are still the owner and have the burden of disposal/reuse. This means NOW would be a great time to implement EPR (extended producer responsibility) for blades so that the manufacturer would see the advantage of building with a reusable material. Just like a deposit return system for bottles ensures responsibility for reuse (and fate, hopefully) of the bottle, a well conceived EPR would bake the disposal costs into initial sale, so blade with reusable material would mean a cheaper initial blade. Thanks for the video, Dave.
Advances in turbine blade recycling are very welcome. However, the problem should be placed in context with the total use of such composites, of which wind turbine blades are a very small proportion
This is a thrilling development in an area that has been wanting for attention. IMO, the development of alternate materials is clearly the right direction since the current generation of materials has both too short a lifetime and major limitations in recycling. PECAN15 sounds like exactly what's needed, which is not to say that further research on even better solutions isn't needed. I think this is an excellent first step and should be put to use immediately. I would really like to see more attention given to extending wind turbine lifetimes, which could further improve to the waste problem and ROI.
Ideally, at the end of a highly stressful dynamic application on wind turbines, blades could be re-purposed to make best use of their structural properties. Perhaps architects and civil engineers could find static uses in buildings and bridges, possibly in fabric tension structures? Maybe they could alternatively be cut into standardised sizes and given a rating in a similar way to structural timber? As always, we should think about best practice in recycling; re-use, re-form, recycle.
4:58 Listening to this section, I had I thought outside the box on a different side. We are so good at making things that are not biodegradable, we should get even better at it and start sequestering more fossil carbon in landfills with our disposable economy. JHT on that!😊
Let's hope they pop up in one of your follow up videos when they are testing full scale prototypes. It seems likely that other GRP products might also get the green treatment courtesy of this product.
Not being able to post links makes discussion difficult, but my view is that basalt fiber hammers all contenders in the application, including resistance, and more or less infinite recyclability. ' Research on fatigue performance of offshore wind turbine blade with basalt fiber bionic plate' -' Compared with other fibers such as glass fiber, basalt fiber not only has excellent mechanical properties such as high strength and high elastic modulus, but also has good physical properties such as corrosion resistance, oxidation resistance, high temperature resistance and sound insulation [3], [4]. With the offshore wind turbine blade entering the hundred meters age, basalt fiber is likely to replace glass fiber and carbon fiber in the field of offshore wind power due to its strength, stiffness, durability and economy.' And: ' Recycling Process of a Basalt Fiber-Epoxy Laminate by Solvolysis: Mechanical and Optical Tests' - ' Breaking tenacity of the recycled basalt fibers is kept up to 90.5% compared to the virgin ones, while, with a pyrolysis treatment, this value cannot exceed the 35%'
Wind turbine blades do not leech and are a miniscule part of landfill... This is a good innovation but hardly a "revolution" (although blades do spin if you can forgive the pun).
I was having trouble swallowing the argument that old turbine blades are a problem. For one, these long blades can produce some long building products just like we do with trees.
I've never understood the pearl clutching about turbine blades not being recyclable. Every single element that went into their production came from out of the ground. Why is it so bad to put them back into the ground? Also, why has there been no similar concern about the many other products that are made from carbon fibre? Seems disingenuous.
Absolutely correct. The often repeated photo of blades in a landfill is zoomed in on a tiny tiny part of a landfill. It gives the impression that it's the whole landfill, but actually wouldn't even be a tenth of one percent of the whole landfill site.
what I find fascinating is that anti-renewable crowd make a big deal of some problems, that even if real, are still minuscule compared to fossil fuels, to the point of it becoming a PR hit to companies investing in those technologies. and end up pushing them to develop solutions to those problems, making renewables even better than they were before.
@@danilooliveira6580 yep. A billion tonnes of coal ash that does actually leach vast quantities of toxic material is apparently fine, while a million tonnes of inert plastics that have been disposed of responsibly is beyond the pale. See also "Aberfan" and hundreds of similar disasters.
PECAN16 sounds wonderful, but the road from research/lab through to production is the real story. But with the 'old tech' blades. using as fill in durable structures especially if it can add reinforcing to replace some cement (flyash can be used instead of cement and is a good way to dispose of dry flyash) in concrete structures. BTW, Looking at using flyash in this way use might be a good video suggestion.
I am curious as to why we need to dispose of these in the first place. Is there structural damage introduced over time that cannot be repaired? Improvements in blade design / efficiency that has an ROI greater than the losses than leaving as-is?
They're constantly being exposed to the sun, and changing between stopped and moving very very fast. That's both fatigue damage and UV damage, not to mention they get rained on. Plus, there's bits of grit in the wind. The blades erode away and bits crack off, making the surface less useful as a wing, hastening the wear, and putting out less power. We likely won't come up with a new material that's light enough to get up to the crazy tip speeds and doesn't slowly degrade in the elements. At least, not better than fiberglass
Yes. Generally flexing in the blade breaks the fibers, eventually it eats into the margin of safey and the blade gets shitcanned. Generally eveything is designed to wear out at more or less the same time.
No one is producing a blade "230 meters in length". The longest is currently China's LZ blade, which is 123 meters. Still ridiculously long, but it will be a while before anyone gets over 200 meters.
He likely meant 230 meter rotor diameter. A 230-meter blade is huge, and I suspect we will never get there from a practicality perspective, but you never know.
When you mention "plant based" I thought it would be about genetically modified trees that grew in the right size and shape to be used as turbine blades straight out of the ground. If a tall tree was used as the tower the blades could grafted in place before it grew to full-size. Indeed they could be harvested at different stages in their growth depending on the size of turbine you required. You could produce anything from a small bush turbine for domestic use to one the size of the mighty redwood.
I wonder what the initial LCOE wouild be for this material use, if it's something that requires too much government subsidy it's difficult to believe it would be widely adopted. Specially given that governments dont seem to be in a rush to stop subsidizing fossil fuels
this is a good example of how good things can be accomplished if you just start from a different position instead of working with the status quo. Maybe we can take another, even better starting position and work from there, whatever that may be.
i learnt today on a channel (the good news channel?), which does monthly vids on good news across myriad interests/sectors, that uk intends/is going to install 50% of the world's wave technology all around the coastline. i was so pleased to hear this because for an island nation, we should be making this our highest form of renewable energy generation
That's like saying your company will cover 50% of the mars tourism market. Nobody is using wave energy generation at any significant scale, so 50% of the market is still basically nothing.
@@Psi-Storm hehe i totally get what ur saying, my wording wasnt that great, ill admit, because my memory sucks when i have brainfog and thus i only wrote what i was certain of. i recall a map visual of the uk and i would guess at 3-4 (proposed?) location pins, (how accurate? i do not know) along the south coast, 7-9 up both east and west coasts. Cld be a graphic the channel created or official It may also be that this would be 50% of globally planned wave tech infrastructure. Cos exact wording escaped me, iv alot on my mind IRL n v distracted of late There are already some wave energy generation installations currently mid-build around the globe. wales has one its started building (last i heard). so it maybe 50% of those already being built this vid wasnt from a climate focused channel, it was a 'x' bits of good news youve missed vid, so low on detail. Reason im liking this bit o news is that looks like uk will take the global lead, take advantage of its natural resources and thus help push things in right direction faster for everyone who can use this tech and for uk's own economy. UK is mostly a financial and services country, which makes us vulnerable to economic shocks and creates inequality gap increases. We need to bring back more manufacturing, more 'creation' jobs to be resilient to weather future shocks. Uk doesnt seem to be able to recover from one shock before the next hits us since 2008. It doesnt matter if it is ridiculously small 5 out of 10 at this stage as long as we become and remain dominant in one sector of the green transition
The Dogger Bank wind farms A to C are using GE Halide turbines. Unfortunately they have had manufacturing issues which is holding up the build out by nearly 12 months now!
I love the idea of Piezoelectric playgrounds for kids with battery packs to generate adjunct electricity to be pulled from to fill short gaps in production
I want to buy a dozen or 2 and turn them into house structural members. Upcycling is the next step on the circular economy journey, and after that, recycling.
"Recyclable" is a pretty fun word and neglects things like costs, energy and emissions required to "recycle" the materials and transportation costs and energy use and emissions to get them to a facility. Then transporting those materials back to a factory where they can be reused. These blades are 50,000lbs each now and are mostly manufactured in China, so transportation will be huge expense and impact to the environment. What seems to be missed is the fact that a modern 5MW onshore turbine will generate as much energy as burning 525,000 tons of coal. So IMHO if these 75 tons of blades end up in a landfill each 25 years, so be it. And with any luck they can be ground up locally and used as aggregate in the concrete of new turbines or mixed with asphalt or concrete for local construction projects. But transporting blades all over hell and expelling untold amounts of energy recycling them is nuts. And all in response to BS conservative criticism as if they ever gave a rats ass about recycling. AND those same people will fight tooth and nail arguing the right for fossil fuel companies to dump toxic waste endlessly into tailings ponds, lakes, rivers, the air we breathe, etc, etc.
For economies still running coal power (yay for UK!), the question of turbine-trash is moot. RUclips's Engineering with Rosie calculated in video "Wind Turbine End of Life Waste" that every household benefiting from the turbine gets a bag of trash after 20 years, compared to coal, which produces 180x that much ash of medium toxicity. PLUS all the co2, which conveniently "just goes away".
230 meters could wrap around my house 5 times almost. That'd make amazing siding. Good for bench seats, and rain covers. Good for shingles. All that would just require cutting the panels into 10cm strips, or squares, and moving them to the job site. Not complicated, or all that expensive. Least compared to burying them forever. Could probably make car panels out of them, but that'd probably require some more shaping. I'm convinced in a hundred years we'll be digging up all the garbage piles to get all the useful stuff buried in them. From organics to metals to polymers, it's got everything. Just need some better sorting tech (or an abundance of labor, insert 'AI is coming for our jerbs" meme here).
I know that there is used a lot of dangerous chemicals when the blades are produced. But Dave is talking of “dangerous chemicals leaking from the blades in landfills”? It’s often said by critics of wind turbines, but is there any evidence of it? It’s reason they are hard to recycle. They are very durable.
The difficulty in recycling is in part because there are different components that are not easily separated from each other,. I heard even the well know Pringle's tube is hard to recycle , even though they contain paper, steel and plastic, because its difficult to isolate those materials cost effectively for a business.
Yes, epoxy polymeres do degrade by decomposing the polymere thus setting the chemicals free. It takes long, but that doesn't make it better. Someday all epoxy will be degraded.
Recycling with natural components sounds great. But what if we take some of the existing non recyclable blades and repurposing them into building materials for housing.I just had a think
Rather than using shredded turbine blades under roads, lets use them under footpath and cycle ways. We need more of those to help support active travel and the alternatives to driving around for short local trips, with all its negatives, and so anything that could reduce the costs of the foot & cycle ways should be welcome.
And what about the horses? Particularly the horses exhausted from chasing foxes? I don't know what the answer is. I don't even know what the question is. However I think that the failure to consider turbine blades within the overall context of the horses represents a severe decline in integrated civilization awareness.
I would have thought that end-of-life turbine blades made of fibre-grass or carbon fibre could be shredded and added to the furnace when making cement. The resin is surely a version of plastic and will incinerate to substitute for some of the fuel required, as will any carbon fibre, and the the glass fibres will melt into the mix. You'd think the high temperatures in the furnace would incinerate adding additives in the resin. Obviously the shredder would have to be enclosed to avoid glass and / or carbon fibre dust escaping.
Is it time to bring in the imaginative architects to incorporate end-of-life wind turbine blades in their designs, for example pairs of blades bolted root-to-root to a triangular section steel ridge beam so as to produce a strong and light roof structure with most weight carried by the central spine, and curtain walling at the tips. Or something like that ...
to me this is similar to what happens when a youtuber always reads the comments. at first they can not let it effect them, but eventually more and more of their videos are wasted effort and time trying to preemtively respond to what the least well-meaning trolls will say, and you wonder: huh? how did they fall into that trap? such is the situation when people say "wind power is so dumb, those blades are DISPOSABLE!! dumb liberals! people inadvertantly get caught into that trap and not realize it. wind turbines were designed with glass fiber and other cheap, plentiful commodities and produce far, far more energy than the cost to produce those basic materials. if you take some sand and make glass fiber and take the equivelant amount of oil that you'd burn driving a half mile in an SUV (or plant based oils if you want to make it over-complicated and less efficient!), and convert that insignificant amount of resources into a wind turbine, the return on investment and overall sustainability is obvious, and that's what we need to be talking about: the details of it. They provide a good useful life and aren't super hazardous to dispose of, they break down relatively quickly and aren't reason for concern in that regard either. Again, this question, in every detail, can be addressed very easily if we talk specifics and not just vague ideas/opinions/rhetoric. what i wish was discussed more is the basic factual economics about these things in a contextualized way. usually it's either "green, environment, buzzwords," or "green technology is all BS, etc,"
Some orange-colored feller told me that them wind turbines (especially them ones off shore) cause butthole cancer. Whodathunk? And butthole cancer is the worst, they say. I'm scared!
If it is downcycling (and it is), then we should already think about, how to reuse or recycle the products form this "elastic liquid". PCAN sounds is better the epoxy raisin+ glass fiber, but as for the recycebility of it... Lots of things right now can be downcycled or even recycled, but we don't do that, cause it is hard to get a clean substrate for recycling. I find it hard to believe that those blades will be as fit for the methanol bath in real life, as in lab. It is hope, but needs real live testing.
Yep. Also, what happens to the recycled product? Are we just creating one further step before landfill, or is it two, or three? Would that be 5 additional years, or 10, or 50? It's not circular anyway, by the sounds of things.
Wood is treated before use, you'd know that if you spent your time doing actual productive work instead of looking for things to cry about on the internet
I feel like mentioning that while putting old turbine blades in landfills isn't ideal, they make up a small fraction of a percent of 'regular' landfill waste. Also some of it has a new life as a pedestrian bridge or ingredient for pavement production. Anyway, biodegradable is definitely better.
As many people have noted, the waste produced is orders of magnitude less than other waste products we definitely aren't even talking about managing, and far less toxic than things like coal ash. Methinks the fossil fuel industry might be influencing the discussion here...
i`ve been saying for years that they should be using hemp for these blades. After a few years of service simply grind them up and use it for bio mass or fertilizer. Hemp!
"Made from recycled rotor blades." Sells itself, wouldn't you think? And pretty hefty material at that, so products made from this stuff would be more expensive but seriously outlast items molded from PLA, etc. I like it.
I have often wondered why the blades were not made of bamboo laminate instead of carbon fiber. Bamboo is a lighter weight density as well as stronger than carbon fiber not to mention easily sourced.
I'm really concerned that sucking energy out of wind flows is going to do some ecological damage if we keep it up. Where I'm at it could dry out the brush or increase the temp locally and make more brush fires. I have no idea how much of this is an issue, but 12 megawatts from one turbine is a lot of energy.
@OutsiderLabs Yeah, that soil just produces infinite trees eh? I'm from a forestry area. Environmental impacts are catastrophic. After a few decades of forestry, the soil is a mess that will need a century or more to recover.
Recycling is a better solution than biodegradability since the utility company will be able to make good money from re-selling an end of life turbine. Potentially reducing the LCOE cost for wind power.
While all these numbers of potential waste from turbine blades sound bad, realize that the CUMULATIVE projected waste from ALL turbines decommissioned between now and 2050 is less than 5 percent of the coal ash the world produces EACH YEAR. So yes, this will be good for PR, and maybe it will even save a little money, but recycling turbine blades is of miniscule importance compared to reducing carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels overall.
Isn't the ash used for concrete and steel? I'm not defending the coal industry, just hoping that the ashes aren't just wasted.
Exactly. Let's not lose the big picture here. But it's still a considerable amount of waste and if that can be avoided, then that is a good thing.
Great point.
@@VeniceInventors In principle, yes, but in fact, only about 60% gets reused, meaning about 200 times more coal ash than turbine blades would have to be disposed of between now and 2050 assuming current levels of coal use. So every wind turbine we build is a massive reduction in the space we need to dispose of waste, even if none of the turbine blades get recycled.
Some glass fibre blades are now being shredded and the waste added to concrete. I do wonder if some practical alternate use could be found for the blades, eg cut them up in to staves and use them for fencing.
On the subject of the blades currently headed to landfill: They could easily serve a second life as a bus shelter, house roof or noise abaitment barrier at the side of a busy carriageway; it shows we have a problem with lack of creative thought rather than an item that is truely at the end of its useful life.
the problem with creative solutions is that they are very niche and don't really solve the problem. they could offer to sell the blades for people wanting to buy them for a specific projects. but overall it wouldn't solve the problem.
I like the way you think
If they could be used to replace structural steel for large span structures like warehouses or solar farms, it coud become a neat solution.
Other ways to reuse the GFR, first-gen blades are materials for wall and floor tiles (which a German SMB is doing already; I'd link the video of German public broadcaster MDR directly but sadly links are not allowed. You find it under the title "Wertvolle Rohstoffe: Wie entsorgt man ein ausrangiertes Windrad richtig? | Umschau | MDR"). Researchers are already finding ways to separate the resin from the fibers of the CFR blades via acid solutions that leave the valuable tissue layers intact and allow for their recycling and of the resin. GFR and CFR fibers are also a good replacement for sand as binding and reinforcement material for concrete.
@@sitling5436 Well, yes but somebody must have thought of that. Don't forget that the turbine blades are old and worn and beyond their useful life. Ordinary punters like you and me don't know what kind of degradation has occurred within the GRP during a hard life bending in the wind.
also, Modvion in Sweden makes full size wooden towers. After the wind turbine's life of 30 years, the tower sections can be re-used as small housing, construction etc. And 100 years after that, as heating fuel. That's a long time carbon sink, while more trees are grown.
RUclips suggested I watch a video on commercial Balsa wood growing.
It’s a big part of turbine blade construction.
Worth a watch.
The best RUclips channels are the ones that have super informative comment sections like this one. Carry on!!!
Dave you always come up with excellent educational content. It really does inspire. I never went to University (much to the chagrin of my former teachers). My excuse was “I’ve tried being skint & don’t like it”. For some years I’ve been interested in materials science & have encouraged younger people to really consider it as a worthwhile study & career. Please keep on doing what you’re doing. 👏🏻
LOVED that intro! 😂 "Well, they've only gone and done it anyway, haven't they?"😂
As others have pointed out, one missing piece of information in the video is the ratio of wind turbine blades to the total amount of stuff going onto landfills. Of course, every single source of waste should be scrutinized, and this video is focused on just one, which is fair, but there's a lot of unnecessary argument caused by leaving this little bit😊 of info out.
What else is there on a windturbine thats not recycleable?
Copper and steel = easy $
Concrete can be recycled in building and making new concrete.
Its only the fiberglass blades and shell that was non recycleable until recently.
I think you misunderstand. Not the ratio of the blades to the rest of the wind turbine, the ratio of wind turbine waste to all of the waste that's put in landfills from any source. @@NewPipeFTW
@@polanve yes, for instance, waste from the coal, oil and natural gas industries. Food packaging that we don't need (not the stuff we do, the unnecessary stuff we all agree is pointless). I think someone else said this is great for PR but won't actually do much. The public perception that this is a lot of waste, is worth fighting with improved recycling.
Does fiberglass really leech that badly? Couldn't the old blades be cut up and used for breakwater sites to protect people from hurricanes and tsunamis?
Google search says "fiberglass material is non-reactive to salt and is not susceptible to corrosion or damage from the salt."
I agree they do not leak. Dave made a mistake there.
It's not just fibreglass though is it, there are plastics and resins involved; could those be a source of harmful chemicals?
@@danyoutube7491 I suppose it's possible. Was thinking processed chunks could be mixed into aquatic concrete and added to breakwater sites. Surely there's a low-tech solution to make good use of them.
The epoxy resin keeping the glass fibres together is indeed not very environmentally friendly and can leech for example BPA when protective layers are eroded or shredded. The reuse potential for now is mostly concrete substrate, for which there is a lot of demand. But the area where demand exists doesn't always match where the turbines are situated. So for multiple reasons it is desirable to use more environmentally friendly resins.
@@LinkeHarryB Thanks for the clarification
I'm glad to hear about the progress being made in this potential recycling field.
Wonderful, a larger footprint per tower.
Meanwhile, a vertical wind turbine design based on large spinnaker sails would catch more wind and be set atop one another.
Each level of the tower should hold 3 to 6 spinnakers to increase rotation. Also, the spinnakers could be made from biodegradable or recyclable materials, such as cloth like the sails on the Cutty Sark or a Clipper ship.
To save weight, the sails could be made in panels or with a grid of small "windows" properly reinforced in the spinnakers.
This design in a compact version that could be mounted atop tall buildings, along the dyed to resemble a merry go round, in urban wind tunnels between buildings, and other windy places.
The vertical layout gives options on where to place the generator, top -middle or -bottom. This will also allow extra sound proofing around the structure. The generator could be put underground.
To minimize tower flex, a set of 4 could be loosely connected at the top by retaining bars.
Just have a Think. If you throw away the box, so much more is possible.
Good news! Great video, Dave, cheers!
What happened to using balsa wood in turbine blades? And by the way, in Denmark they use turbine blades for bus stop covers and parking lot covers.
That could give a modern art feeling to the roof - I am all for that.
Torsional rigidity for one
Balsa 😅
The rotor diameter is 260m, not the blade length. The blades would be about 120m, most of the radius. SANY has been making 130m blades in China.
Good news! Thank you.
Clearly many people have not seen your other videos on the attempt to recycle the existing blades so perhaps they should look those up. Thanks for this very good news. NREL is one of the best places to get up to date green research in the US for many years now.
Thanks for the new video!
I love some of the architectural features old blades have been used for, a bus/coach shelter, overengineered, and beautiful.
Thanks again for some hopeful news, Dave! 🎉😊
Necessity is the mother of invention. Great to see this development, hopefully this becomes industry standard, soon.
How do the fiberglass blades leech toxic chemicals into landfills? Aren’t they inert? And how much mass/volume do blades make up in landfills compared to municipal solid waste?
No they don't and I once did the math. The blades in the whole world who will be decommised is about the same amount as 8 years of building vaste in my home country Denmark. And I live in a very small country. Nearly nothing af that waste is recycled.
Engineering with Rosie, calculated that if a person powered their home from wind power for 20 years, they would be contributing 9kg of composite waste to landfill. Buying a carbon fiber bike produces more composite waste.
Thanks Dave
Hi Dave, Another awesome video with great information! Thumbs up! Jim
I was thinking this would have "Hemp" in it's mix as that plant can be used for this as well, but anything that moves to stop humanities rush to end this planet's ability to support life as we know it is welcome.
So was I 😊
Have you seen Henry Ford taking a sledge hammer to his hemp bodied car and watching the hammer bounce off?
@@morninboy Yes, I remember that. I think they should revisit Hemp as I think that will solve many of their problems. ruclips.net/video/srgE6Tzi3Lg/видео.html
hemp is not magic, it's just really good fibers. but carbon fibers are not the problem here, it's the polymers used to bind everything together. if they used hemp they would still need to use the same polymers to give it rigidity.
@@danilooliveira6580 I think when Ford made his hemp bodied car they used hemp based resins
I noticed that Siemens Gamesa are developing a fully recyclable blade. As with all aspects of renewable energy, things keep getting better and better over time. That is what I love about this industry. I also hope that the current blades in landfills will be recycled in the future, in an energy to waste type set up maybe ?????
Thank you.
Sounds good as far as it goes.
I'll wait and see where this stuff ends up after it's second life and what you can do with it from there.
Three steps down, shopping bags
Ahhh thanks Dave that sounds really exciting ................. thanks for all you do
sounds brilliant !! 🤞🤞🤞
Very interesting. And very needed. I didn't hear you mention it ... but ... another major (new?) concern with these fiberglass wind turbine blades is that they do degrade while in service. They actually shed fiberglass material off the blades and into the surrounding environment. Floating ones ... into the seas/oceans ... and land based ones, which usually (around us, at least) is in farm lands. That is into the food supply. Can you say "Yikes!".
This brings to mind the push several years ago to switch from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs ... which I did ... but which, as I did hear later, contained mercury in the base and which were most probably mostly thrown into landfills as well. Can you say "Yikes!", again.
Last item on the "balance out the good with the bad" rant; Solar panels. I love the tech ... I am a retired engineer ... I've been keeping my eyes on the progress for a long time. Initially, I had heard that it took more energy to mine & transport materials, manufacture, transport and install than the panels would ever generate in their lifetimes. Also when I looked at it a bunch of years ago the cost verses payback was absurd.
However, time passes, progress is made. However, the one aspect that I continue to monitor is their disposal. They contain a lot of heavy metals and the vast majority of the panels reaching their end of life are ... surprise, surprise ... being dumped into the landfills. Third times the charm ... "Yikes!"
It may sound like I'm against all these ... I am not. I'm again looking into getting my house set up with solar/batteries/inverter.
I guess I may do what everyone else is doing ... kick that can down the street, to be delt with later by somebody else.
The amount of mass that they shed is trivial compared to the real problems, like plastic packaging, plastic clothing fibers, fishnets, etc. We need to think about the harm of NOT using wind power. Coal is a thousand times worse. Maybe a million times worse.
Great video as usual 👌
Thanks!
Really good episode. Yes to it being limited testing nit it doesn't wound B.S. Thanks as ever
Bio renewable resources are future anyway since we have limited resources and not everything can be recycled
What I think is that first we will move towards alternatives and recycling and in the end back to natural or biological resources in every possible sector may be it construction or computing ❤
Thanks
Gracias
I've been pondering how our energy production -and needs- are evolving, and I'm glad to see that recycling is making its way into wind, hopefully into solar as well. It is certainly more encouraging than what I remember in the dystopian movie "Soylent Green," in which Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) had to mount a stationary bicycle in their apartment to keep the single pitiful lightbulb glowing. 😦
Worth a go. I'm a bigger fan of solar panels all over every building and parking lot. From what I understand, the materials for those are very recyclable.
Stick to your guns. By my estimates the cost of putting solar panels on homes to equal the amount of a given wind farm is about 1/10 the cost. Another words that takes about $200,000 worth of equipment out in the water to obtain the electricity that you get from $20,000 worth of solar panels on a home.
Amazing
Turbine blades are a pretty small fraction of the market for fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Auto, truck, and aircraft bodies, furnishings, architectural components . . . the potential is huge for a truly re-usuable polymer.
I also wonder what, exactly, is the failure mode for blades that reach the end of their lives while still in use. If the carbon fibers are still fine, would it be possible to anneal the blades, relieving any internal stresses and healing any cracks and delaminations? (You'd need some degree of thermoplasticity in the cured polymer, but that can be designed in.)
Marvelous stuff. Reminds me of the alchemy of ox blood and manure in cement
This seems to be good development, engineers ans scientists never give up...
Use the blades for housing.
I'd live in a couple of sections of turbine blade. Could make a pretty cool home.
The wind turbine blades make up less than 10% of the total composites that are disposed of in landfills. There is a much larger amount of composites like boat hulls, shower stalls, surfboards, industrial waste, etc.
Every % count.
I was thinking about the Netherlands and their polder system recently...
Couldn't the used blades we've already made go into raising low-lying areas with these stable materials? That could be a benefit from such blades until they are phased out.
Good point. And this not only goes for turbine blades. As en aeronautical engineer, the use of composite carbon fibre has concerns me. As it breaks down its not going to be good for the environment. Great to see solutions being proposed.
I think the Sopwith Camel had a plant based propeller!
Most likely as early props were wooden. Incidentally, I had the pleasure of talking to an ex Sopwith Camel pilot in the early 1970s.
The 30 to 90% reduction in GHG emissions for the SECOND iteration of these turbine blades is great, but that doesn't help the primary producer unless they are still the owner and have the burden of disposal/reuse. This means NOW would be a great time to implement EPR (extended producer responsibility) for blades so that the manufacturer would see the advantage of building with a reusable material. Just like a deposit return system for bottles ensures responsibility for reuse (and fate, hopefully) of the bottle, a well conceived EPR would bake the disposal costs into initial sale, so blade with reusable material would mean a cheaper initial blade. Thanks for the video, Dave.
Advances in turbine blade recycling are very welcome. However, the problem should be placed in context with the total use of such composites, of which wind turbine blades are a very small proportion
Interesting! It makes me wonder about the current state of solar PV recyclability
Good
This is a thrilling development in an area that has been wanting for attention. IMO, the development of alternate materials is clearly the right direction since the current generation of materials has both too short a lifetime and major limitations in recycling. PECAN15 sounds like exactly what's needed, which is not to say that further research on even better solutions isn't needed. I think this is an excellent first step and should be put to use immediately. I would really like to see more attention given to extending wind turbine lifetimes, which could further improve to the waste problem and ROI.
Also the half tip could be used as re rigid sail for modern sail ships.
Ideally, at the end of a highly stressful dynamic application on wind turbines, blades could be re-purposed to make best use of their structural properties. Perhaps architects and civil engineers could find static uses in buildings and bridges, possibly in fabric tension structures? Maybe they could alternatively be cut into standardised sizes and given a rating in a similar way to structural timber? As always, we should think about best practice in recycling; re-use, re-form, recycle.
4:58 Listening to this section, I had I thought outside the box on a different side.
We are so good at making things that are not biodegradable, we should get even better at it and start sequestering more fossil carbon in landfills with our disposable economy.
JHT on that!😊
Let's hope they pop up in one of your follow up videos when they are testing full scale prototypes. It seems likely that other GRP products might also get the green treatment courtesy of this product.
Not being able to post links makes discussion difficult, but my view is that basalt fiber hammers all contenders in the application, including resistance, and more or less infinite recyclability.
' Research on fatigue performance of offshore wind turbine blade with basalt fiber bionic plate'
-' Compared with other fibers such as glass fiber, basalt fiber not only has excellent mechanical properties such as high strength and high elastic modulus, but also has good physical properties such as corrosion resistance, oxidation resistance, high temperature resistance and sound insulation [3], [4]. With the offshore wind turbine blade entering the hundred meters age, basalt fiber is likely to replace glass fiber and carbon fiber in the field of offshore wind power due to its strength, stiffness, durability and economy.'
And:
' Recycling Process of a Basalt Fiber-Epoxy Laminate by Solvolysis: Mechanical and Optical Tests'
- ' Breaking tenacity of the recycled basalt fibers is kept up to 90.5% compared to
the virgin ones, while, with a pyrolysis treatment, this value cannot exceed the 35%'
Wind turbine blades do not leech and are a miniscule part of landfill... This is a good innovation but hardly a "revolution" (although blades do spin if you can forgive the pun).
I was having trouble swallowing the argument that old turbine blades are a problem. For one, these long blades can produce some long building products just like we do with trees.
I've never understood the pearl clutching about turbine blades not being recyclable. Every single element that went into their production came from out of the ground. Why is it so bad to put them back into the ground? Also, why has there been no similar concern about the many other products that are made from carbon fibre? Seems disingenuous.
Absolutely correct. The often repeated photo of blades in a landfill is zoomed in on a tiny tiny part of a landfill. It gives the impression that it's the whole landfill, but actually wouldn't even be a tenth of one percent of the whole landfill site.
what I find fascinating is that anti-renewable crowd make a big deal of some problems, that even if real, are still minuscule compared to fossil fuels, to the point of it becoming a PR hit to companies investing in those technologies. and end up pushing them to develop solutions to those problems, making renewables even better than they were before.
@@danilooliveira6580 yep. A billion tonnes of coal ash that does actually leach vast quantities of toxic material is apparently fine, while a million tonnes of inert plastics that have been disposed of responsibly is beyond the pale.
See also "Aberfan" and hundreds of similar disasters.
PECAN16 sounds wonderful, but the road from research/lab through to production is the real story. But with the 'old tech' blades. using as fill in durable structures especially if it can add reinforcing to replace some cement (flyash can be used instead of cement and is a good way to dispose of dry flyash) in concrete structures. BTW, Looking at using flyash in this way use might be a good video suggestion.
Pretty soon we're going to start seeing shipyards repurposed as wind turbine factories.
Already happening in Denmark
That happened a long time ago. Usually building the support structures.
We saved, we saved!!!
What about covering and filling with concrete to be breakwaters/reef nurseries
I am curious as to why we need to dispose of these in the first place. Is there structural damage introduced over time that cannot be repaired? Improvements in blade design / efficiency that has an ROI greater than the losses than leaving as-is?
They're constantly being exposed to the sun, and changing between stopped and moving very very fast.
That's both fatigue damage and UV damage, not to mention they get rained on.
Plus, there's bits of grit in the wind.
The blades erode away and bits crack off, making the surface less useful as a wing, hastening the wear, and putting out less power.
We likely won't come up with a new material that's light enough to get up to the crazy tip speeds and doesn't slowly degrade in the elements. At least, not better than fiberglass
Yes. Generally flexing in the blade breaks the fibers, eventually it eats into the margin of safey and the blade gets shitcanned. Generally eveything is designed to wear out at more or less the same time.
It's a Huge development in terms of Recycling and waste disposal. Fabulous .
No one is producing a blade "230 meters in length". The longest is currently China's LZ blade, which is 123 meters. Still ridiculously long, but it will be a while before anyone gets over 200 meters.
He likely meant 230 meter rotor diameter. A 230-meter blade is huge, and I suspect we will never get there from a practicality perspective, but you never know.
@@edl653 Obviously...rocketmanz not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
There is a nation who must have the biggest of everything to compensate for,enough so lets wait and see
When you mention "plant based" I thought it would be about genetically modified trees that grew in the right size and shape to be used as turbine blades straight out of the ground.
If a tall tree was used as the tower the blades could grafted in place before it grew to full-size. Indeed they could be harvested at different stages in their growth depending on the size of turbine you required. You could produce anything from a small bush turbine for domestic use to one the size of the mighty redwood.
I wonder what the initial LCOE wouild be for this material use, if it's something that requires too much government subsidy it's difficult to believe it would be widely adopted. Specially given that governments dont seem to be in a rush to stop subsidizing fossil fuels
You meant to say at the end: "without the support of patrons this channel literally wouldn't *subsist*...", as opposed to "exist" 😜
this is a good example of how good things can be accomplished if you just start from a different position instead of working with the status quo. Maybe we can take another, even better starting position and work from there, whatever that may be.
i learnt today on a channel (the good news channel?), which does monthly vids on good news across myriad interests/sectors, that uk intends/is going to install 50% of the world's wave technology all around the coastline. i was so pleased to hear this because for an island nation, we should be making this our highest form of renewable energy generation
That's like saying your company will cover 50% of the mars tourism market. Nobody is using wave energy generation at any significant scale, so 50% of the market is still basically nothing.
@@Psi-Storm hehe i totally get what ur saying, my wording wasnt that great, ill admit, because my memory sucks when i have brainfog and thus i only wrote what i was certain of.
i recall a map visual of the uk and i would guess at 3-4 (proposed?) location pins, (how accurate? i do not know) along the south coast, 7-9 up both east and west coasts. Cld be a graphic the channel created or official
It may also be that this would be 50% of globally planned wave tech infrastructure. Cos exact wording escaped me, iv alot on my mind IRL n v distracted of late
There are already some wave energy generation installations currently mid-build around the globe. wales has one its started building (last i heard). so it maybe 50% of those already being built
this vid wasnt from a climate focused channel, it was a 'x' bits of good news youve missed vid, so low on detail.
Reason im liking this bit o news is that looks like uk will take the global lead, take advantage of its natural resources and thus help push things in right direction faster for everyone who can use this tech and for uk's own economy.
UK is mostly a financial and services country, which makes us vulnerable to economic shocks and creates inequality gap increases. We need to bring back more manufacturing, more 'creation' jobs to be resilient to weather future shocks. Uk doesnt seem to be able to recover from one shock before the next hits us since 2008.
It doesnt matter if it is ridiculously small 5 out of 10 at this stage as long as we become and remain dominant in one sector of the green transition
The Dogger Bank wind farms A to C are using GE Halide turbines. Unfortunately they have had manufacturing issues which is holding up the build out by nearly 12 months now!
Todays good news!
I love the idea of Piezoelectric playgrounds for kids with battery packs to generate adjunct electricity to be pulled from to fill short gaps in production
I want to buy a dozen or 2 and turn them into house structural members. Upcycling is the next step on the circular economy journey, and after that, recycling.
"Recyclable" is a pretty fun word and neglects things like costs, energy and emissions required to "recycle" the materials and transportation costs and energy use and emissions to get them to a facility. Then transporting those materials back to a factory where they can be reused.
These blades are 50,000lbs each now and are mostly manufactured in China, so transportation will be huge expense and impact to the environment.
What seems to be missed is the fact that a modern 5MW onshore turbine will generate as much energy as burning 525,000 tons of coal. So IMHO if these 75 tons of blades end up in a landfill each 25 years, so be it. And with any luck they can be ground up locally and used as aggregate in the concrete of new turbines or mixed with asphalt or concrete for local construction projects.
But transporting blades all over hell and expelling untold amounts of energy recycling them is nuts. And all in response to BS conservative criticism as if they ever gave a rats ass about recycling. AND those same people will fight tooth and nail arguing the right for fossil fuel companies to dump toxic waste endlessly into tailings ponds, lakes, rivers, the air we breathe, etc, etc.
I'm no engineer, but, unless some of the comments are wrong, it sounds like a win, win, win. At least, I hope it is.
For economies still running coal power (yay for UK!), the question of turbine-trash is moot. RUclips's Engineering with Rosie calculated in video "Wind Turbine End of Life Waste" that every household benefiting from the turbine gets a bag of trash after 20 years, compared to coal, which produces 180x that much ash of medium toxicity. PLUS all the co2, which conveniently "just goes away".
Has anyone looked at using Bamboo or Hemp in their testing? Fast growing, great fibres.
Fibres aren't the issue, the resin binding them is
230 meters could wrap around my house 5 times almost. That'd make amazing siding.
Good for bench seats, and rain covers. Good for shingles.
All that would just require cutting the panels into 10cm strips, or squares, and moving them to the job site. Not complicated, or all that expensive. Least compared to burying them forever.
Could probably make car panels out of them, but that'd probably require some more shaping.
I'm convinced in a hundred years we'll be digging up all the garbage piles to get all the useful stuff buried in them. From organics to metals to polymers, it's got everything. Just need some better sorting tech (or an abundance of labor, insert 'AI is coming for our jerbs" meme here).
I know that there is used a lot of dangerous chemicals when the blades are produced. But Dave is talking of “dangerous chemicals leaking from the blades in landfills”? It’s often said by critics of wind turbines, but is there any evidence of it? It’s reason they are hard to recycle. They are very durable.
The difficulty in recycling is in part because there are different components that are not easily separated from each other,. I heard even the well know Pringle's tube is hard to recycle , even though they contain paper, steel and plastic, because its difficult to isolate those materials cost effectively for a business.
Yes, epoxy polymeres do degrade by decomposing the polymere thus setting the chemicals free. It takes long, but that doesn't make it better. Someday all epoxy will be degraded.
Indeed. There is no actual issue here
| @flexiblebirdchannel
| Yes, epoxy polymeres do degrade
'In the ground' is a long time. Modernist humans always think too short term, don't they?
@@UsualYaddaYadda Cool so no problem with us burying nuclear waste then?
Recycling with natural components sounds great. But what if we take some of the existing non recyclable blades and repurposing them into building materials for housing.I just had a think
Rather than using shredded turbine blades under roads, lets use them under footpath and cycle ways. We need more of those to help support active travel and the alternatives to driving around for short local trips, with all its negatives, and so anything that could reduce the costs of the foot & cycle ways should be welcome.
Why not shred all non recyclable plastics and makes roads etc out of them. It not a solution.
And what about the horses? Particularly the horses exhausted from chasing foxes?
I don't know what the answer is. I don't even know what the question is.
However I think that the failure to consider turbine blades within the overall context of the horses represents a severe decline in integrated civilization awareness.
Or pile''em on the foreshore as breakwaters?
I would have thought that end-of-life turbine blades made of fibre-grass or carbon fibre could be shredded and added to the furnace when making cement. The resin is surely a version of plastic and will incinerate to substitute for some of the fuel required, as will any carbon fibre, and the the glass fibres will melt into the mix. You'd think the high temperatures in the furnace would incinerate adding additives in the resin. Obviously the shredder would have to be enclosed to avoid glass and / or carbon fibre dust escaping.
Is it time to bring in the imaginative architects to incorporate end-of-life wind turbine blades in their designs, for example pairs of blades bolted root-to-root to a triangular section steel ridge beam so as to produce a strong and light roof structure with most weight carried by the central spine, and curtain walling at the tips. Or something like that ...
to me this is similar to what happens when a youtuber always reads the comments. at first they can not let it effect them, but eventually more and more of their videos are wasted effort and time trying to preemtively respond to what the least well-meaning trolls will say, and you wonder: huh? how did they fall into that trap?
such is the situation when people say "wind power is so dumb, those blades are DISPOSABLE!! dumb liberals! people inadvertantly get caught into that trap and not realize it.
wind turbines were designed with glass fiber and other cheap, plentiful commodities and produce far, far more energy than the cost to produce those basic materials. if you take some sand and make glass fiber and take the equivelant amount of oil that you'd burn driving a half mile in an SUV (or plant based oils if you want to make it over-complicated and less efficient!), and convert that insignificant amount of resources into a wind turbine, the return on investment and overall sustainability is obvious, and that's what we need to be talking about: the details of it. They provide a good useful life and aren't super hazardous to dispose of, they break down relatively quickly and aren't reason for concern in that regard either. Again, this question, in every detail, can be addressed very easily if we talk specifics and not just vague ideas/opinions/rhetoric.
what i wish was discussed more is the basic factual economics about these things in a contextualized way. usually it's either "green, environment, buzzwords," or "green technology is all BS, etc,"
Some orange-colored feller told me that them wind turbines (especially them ones off shore) cause butthole cancer. Whodathunk? And butthole cancer is the worst, they say. I'm scared!
If it is downcycling (and it is), then we should already think about, how to reuse or recycle the products form this "elastic liquid".
PCAN sounds is better the epoxy raisin+ glass fiber, but as for the recycebility of it... Lots of things right now can be downcycled or even recycled, but we don't do that, cause it is hard to get a clean substrate for recycling. I find it hard to believe that those blades will be as fit for the methanol bath in real life, as in lab. It is hope, but needs real live testing.
Yep. Also, what happens to the recycled product? Are we just creating one further step before landfill, or is it two, or three? Would that be 5 additional years, or 10, or 50? It's not circular anyway, by the sounds of things.
Windmills rock
Yummy! The insects and animals will enjoy eating these plant based products.
Wood is treated before use, you'd know that if you spent your time doing actual productive work instead of looking for things to cry about on the internet
@OutsiderLabs that is mean!
One turbine manufacturer (Oersted or Vestas ??) has committed to deploy biodegradable blades at some future date....
I feel like mentioning that while putting old turbine blades in landfills isn't ideal, they make up a small fraction of a percent of 'regular' landfill waste. Also some of it has a new life as a pedestrian bridge or ingredient for pavement production. Anyway, biodegradable is definitely better.
As many people have noted, the waste produced is orders of magnitude less than other waste products we definitely aren't even talking about managing, and far less toxic than things like coal ash. Methinks the fossil fuel industry might be influencing the discussion here...
i`ve been saying for years that they should be using hemp for these blades. After a few years of service simply grind them up and use it for bio mass or fertilizer. Hemp!
The resin is the problem, not the fibres. Making them from hemp would make no difference in the toxicity of the waste
"Made from recycled rotor blades." Sells itself, wouldn't you think? And pretty hefty material at that, so products made from this stuff would be more expensive but seriously outlast items molded from PLA, etc. I like it.
Chemical companies may fight to keep providing the landfill based method. history shows how that works out.
I have often wondered why the blades were not made of bamboo laminate instead of carbon fiber. Bamboo is a lighter weight density as well as stronger than carbon fiber not to mention easily sourced.
I'm really concerned that sucking energy out of wind flows is going to do some ecological damage if we keep it up. Where I'm at it could dry out the brush or increase the temp locally and make more brush fires. I have no idea how much of this is an issue, but 12 megawatts from one turbine is a lot of energy.
Over 70% of new wind turbines have balsa wood as their cores already.
Goodbye what's left of Balsa stands....
@@Shrouded_reaperit's called tree farming, they're literally infinitely renewable
@OutsiderLabs Yeah, that soil just produces infinite trees eh? I'm from a forestry area. Environmental impacts are catastrophic. After a few decades of forestry, the soil is a mess that will need a century or more to recover.
Really clever how the previous turbine manufacturers offloaded the end-of-life cost for these devices on somebody else.
Hardly original - industry has been doing this for centuries.
We just need to find something to do with the goo. Probably turn out as popular as old blades
Recycling is a better solution than biodegradability since the utility company will be able to make good money from re-selling an end of life turbine. Potentially reducing the LCOE cost for wind power.